Press Room

18th Annual Bard Music Festival Elgar and His World

TWO SUMMER WEEKENDS, AUGUST 10–12 AND AUGUST 17–19, FEATURE EXPANSIVE SURVEY OF MUSIC BY EDWARD ELGAR

AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES, ILLUMINATED BY NUMEROUS

PRECONCERT TALKS, PANEL DISCUSSIONS, AND A SYMPOSIUM FOCUSING ON ELGAR’S LIFE AND TIMES

HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE OPENING WEEKEND PROGRAMS OF CHAMBER AND ORCHESTRAL MUSIC – INCLUDING ELGAR’S BREAKTHROUGH WORK, THE “ENIGMA” VARIATIONS – AND THE FESTIVAL FINALE, A PERFORMANCE OF ELGAR’S MAGISTERIAL ORATORIO,

THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.” – Edward Elgar

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY – The world-renowned Bard Music Festival, the centerpiece of Bard SummerScape, returns for its 18th season this summer with a celebration of “Elgar and His World.” The eleven programs of the Bard Music Festival, held over two weekends on August 10–12 and August 17–19, and concluding with an autumnal finale on October 26–27, will explore the life, times, and music of Edward Elgar (1857–1934) with a lavish menu of thematically organized concerts, lectures, panels, and symposia. Assessing Bard’s tribute to Edward Elgar on the 150th anniversary of his birth, BBC Music magazine recently credited SummerScape with offering “the largest, most obsessively detailed Elgar festival anywhere in the world.”

The Bard Music Festival has won international acclaim for its unrivaled, in-depth exploration of the life and works of a single composer and his contemporaries, offering, in the words of one New York Times critic, a “rich web of context” for a full appreciation of that composer’s influences and impact. This year’s offerings includes music by nearly three dozen composers – featuring instrumental, chamber, orchestral, and choral works written for the church, concert stage, and music hall – as well as scholarly insight from important musicological figures. At the heart of the Bard Music Festival, of course, will be Elgar’s ennobling music itself, by turns grandly public and deeply personal, earthy and yet searchingly spiritual.

The Bard Music Festival examines Elgar as a composer whose music uniquely expressed the zeitgeist of a complicated society and era. Elgar provides a nexus for a searching investigation of musical and societal developments in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. His class status, along with his vacillating religious beliefs and evolving aesthetics, invite consideration of his music and personality through the prism provided by revisionist history, psychology, and culture. Elgar’s world is not just that of Wagner, Brahms, Fauré, and Strauss – and such younger British colleagues as Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and Arthur Bliss – but also includes such luminaries as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, John Singer Sargent, and Siegfried Sassoon. Music for full orchestra and chorus, solo piano, brass band, string orchestra, solo voice, and everything in between, is featured.

Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra are in residence throughout the Bard Music Festival, playing such popular works as Elgar’s breakthrough orchestral piece of 1899, the “Enigma” Variations, and various marches including Pomp and Circumstance No. 4 (August 11), as well as lesser-known works such as the symphonic study Falstaff and the Symphony No. 2 (August 18). Botstein and the ASO, along with the Bard Festival Chorale, bring the festival’s summer offerings to a close with Elgar’s choral masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius (August 19).

Works by dozens of other composers have also been programmed – including a host of Elgar’s English contemporaries, ranging from William Sterndale Bennett, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Hubert Parry to Arthur Sullivan, Percy Grainger, Ethel Smyth, and William Walton. The fact that Elgar’s music was appreciated abroad, almost exclusively in Germany, makes the inclusion of such composers as Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss especially appropriate. The music of France, so greatly admired by Elgar, is represented with works by Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy. Patrons of the Bard Music Festival are familiar with its multi-disciplinary approach to the matter at hand, with its astonishing array of resident and visiting musicians, panel discussions, symposia, preconcert lectures by scholars and experts, and concerts. Programs are organized by topics, such as “Elgar: From Autodidact to ‘Master of the King’s Musick’,” “Music in the Era of Queen Victoria,” and “Das Land ohne Musik: Views of British Music in the 19th Century.” The symposium “Charles Darwin and Cardinal Newman” will explore the topics of religion, science, and technology in Elgar’s time.

As with each Bard Music Festival since 1990, Princeton University Press will publish a volume of new scholarship and interpretation. Byron Adams, scholar in residence for this year’s festival, is editor of Elgar and His World, the 18th in the award-winning series. In addition to Mr. Adams, this year’s speakers, panelists, and moderators include Timothy Barringer, Christina Bashford, Leon Botstein, Deirdre d’Albertis, Richard Dellamora, Christopher Fifield, Alain Frogley, Sophie Fuller, Christopher H. Gibbs, Kenneth Hamilton, Charles Edward McGuire, Diana McVeagh, Andrew Porter, Barrymore Scherer, Derek Scott, and Richard Wilson.

Reviewing the final weekend of last year’s Bard Music Festival, dedicated to the world of Franz Liszt, the New York Times reported, “As impressive as many of the festival performances were, they were matched by the audience’s engagement: strangers met and conversed, analyzing the music they’d heard with sophistication, and a Sunday-morning panel discussion of gender issues in 19th-century culture drew a nearly full house. All told,it was a model for an enlightened society.”

Among Elgar’s compositions, his “Enigma” Variations and the series of Pomp and Circumstance marches most clearly embody the poles that defined Victorian England: imperialist expansion and an inward-looking pride, sentiment, and romanticizing nostalgia.

Elgar’s status changed virtually overnight with the first performance in 1899 of the “Enigma” Variations. Premiered by Hans Richter, the internationally renowned conductor and one of Wagner’s devoted protégés, these coruscating orchestral variations revealed fully for the first time the composer’s astonishing orchestral virtuosity. Elgar’s sudden achievement of a position of preeminence as an English composer is itself a subject of fascination, since as a provincial, middle-class autodidact and Catholic, he was subject to ostracism. Given his initially marginal status, it is ironic that Elgar’s music would come to embody early 20th-century England, not only within the British Empire, but to audiences all over the world.

Program Five: Imperial Pomp and Pastoral Nostalgia: British Music for Brass and Strings

Sosnoff Theater

4:30 pm Preconcert Talk: Christopher Fifield

5:30 pm Performance: Laura Ahlbeck, oboe; Randolph Bowman, flute; Members of the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; The Gramercy Brass Orchestra of New York, conducted by John Lambert, music director

From Romanticism to Modernism: World War I and the End of the Long 19th Century

The fin-de-siècle was a period greatly occupied with questions of theology, science, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and psychology, which were discussed with tremendous urgency in the works of Elgar’s contemporaries, such as Oscar Wilde, the pre-Raphaelite painters, J.M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame), John Ruskin, Walter Pater, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, and John Singer Sargent. But these questions also left their mark on music. Elgar had mainly looked abroad for inspiration, and for the wide range of disparate influences that contributed to the evolution of his inimitable style, among them the music of Brahms, Wagner, Fauré, and Richard Strauss. These influences made him a remarkably cosmopolitan figure before World War I. But with the end of the war, Elgar’s style seemed increasingly obsolete in the face of innovative developments within 20th-century English music.